Robot Halloween Videos: Humanoids, Hands, Vacuums, more

Video Friday is your weekly number of superior robotics movies, collected by your folks at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the subsequent few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Get pleasure from at the moment’s movies!

Completely satisfied Halloween from UCL!

[ University College London ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from KIMLAB!

[ Kinetic Intelligent Machine Lab ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from the DRAGON Lab!

[ DRAGON Lab, University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Moju!

Completely satisfied Halloween from Agility Robotics!

[ Agility Robotics ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from HEBI Robotics!

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Now you can pay 1X $500/mo to gather knowledge in your house.

And it’s about what you’d count on:

[ 1X ] by way of [ WSJ ]

At our check warehouse, we recreate our clients’ inbound operations, from the dock configuration and conveyors, to the freight and past. Step inside our Stretch testing facility to study concerning the the most recent developments in warehouse automation and discover how we guarantee strong, dependable efficiency in the actual world.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Effectively that is simply imply. Essential, however imply.

[ Istituto Italiano de Tecnologia ]

SpikeATac is a a multimodal tactile finger combining a taxelized and extremely delicate dynamic response (PVDF) with a static transduction methodology (capacitive) for multimodal contact sensing. Named for its `spiky’ response, SpikeATac’s multitaxel PVDF movie offers quick, delicate dynamic alerts to the very onset and breaking of contact, offering the power to cease rapidly and delicately when greedy fragile, deformable objects.

[ ROAM Lab, Columbia University ]

Successfully integrating various sensory representations is essential for strong robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, the everyday method of characteristic concatenation is usually suboptimal: dominant modalities similar to imaginative and prescient can overwhelm sparse however vital alerts like contact in contact-rich duties, and monolithic architectures can not flexibly incorporate new or lacking modalities with out retraining. Our methodology factorizes the coverage right into a set of diffusion fashions, every specialised for a single illustration (e.g., imaginative and prescient or contact), and employs a router community that learns consensus weights to adaptively mix their contributions, enabling incremental integration of latest representations.

[ GitHub ]

Thanks, Haonan!

Common-purpose robots ought to possess human-like dexterity and agility to carry out duties with the identical versatility as us. A human-like kind issue additional permits using huge datasets of human-hand interactions. Nevertheless, the first bottleneck in dexterous manipulation lies not solely in software program however arguably much more in {hardware}. We current the open-source ORCA hand, a dependable and anthropomorphic 17-DoF tendon-driven robotic hand with built-in tactile sensors, totally assembled in lower than eight hours and constructed for a cloth value under 2,000 CHF.

[ ORCA ]

College of Chicago pc scientist Sarah Sebo is programming robots to present empathetic responses and carry out nonverbal social cues like nodding to higher construct belief and rapport with people. The objective is to develop robots that may enhance efficiency in human-robot teams, similar to enhancing studying outcomes for youngsters.

[ University of Chicago ]

DJI has a robot vacuum now, which is ok. So far as I could make out, we’ve reached the purpose the place nearly each robotic vacuum is (for higher or worse) simply that: nice.

[ DJI ]

This ICRA 2025 keynote is from Angela Schoellig at Technical College of Munich, on “Powering Robotics with AI.”

[ ICRA 2025 ]

This Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute (CMU RI) Seminar is from Nancy Pollard, on “Bringing Dexterity to Robot Hands within the Actual World.”

Dexterous manipulation is a grand problem of robotics, and nice manipulation abilities are required for a lot of robotics purposes that we envision. On this overview discuss, I’ll talk about my view of some main components that contribute to dexterity and talk about how we are able to incorporate them into our robots and techniques.

[ CMU RI ]